The new WHO GENERATION

Anniversary tour pulls fans of all ages

By Barbara Vancheri

Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Back in Philadelphia, the neighbors call Phyllis Bryan and her family the “concert busters.” Have concert, will travel is their motto — particularly for The Who.

The 36-year-old Bryan first saw the British rockers in 1969 at Woodstock, in the halcyon days before commemorative plastic Coke cups and $20 tour T-shirts (although they’re still tie-dyeing some of them). Last night in Pittsburgh, Bryan and her 19-year-old daughter, Bernadette, saw their third Who show in a week — and emerged with their hearing intact. No new entries were written for the Guinness Book of World Records, where The Who once landed for reaching a devilish decibel level.

“Rock ’n’ roll’s a part of us,” explained Bernadette, clad in an official red, white and blue Who tour T-shirt. In fact, it’s so much a part of the clan that she spent 24 hours in a self-designed box in Philadelphia to win a pair of front-row seats from a radio station there. And this week, she and her mother slept in their car after arriving here happy but broke.

Unlike their two nights in Philadelphia, The Who did not play to a sold-out house at Three Rivers Stadium. But that mattered little to the roughly 45,000 fans who erupted into cheers at 7:45 p.m. when the band galloped onto the centerfield stage to the tune of “Bonanza.”

Yes, it was the same melody that opened the show featuring Pa, Hoss, Little Joe and Adam, the top-rated American TV program during the 1960s when the boys in Britain were just getting started. The Western theme would emerge again (just briefly) when singer Roger Daltrey swung his microphone like a lasso — to the screaming delight of the fans.

As expected, The Who opened with the overture from “Tommy” and the scene-setter from the rock opera, “It’s a Boy.” After roughly 40 minutes of “Tommy” tunes, the band switched to some of its classic numbers as Pete Townshend told the appreciative crowd, “Things have changed a lot in Pittsburgh in the last 10 years. … It’s a great place.”